Rolando has been a long time coming -- we first heard about the game on a tip directly from Simon Oliver, the game's creator himself, while he was working with an unofficial iPhone development kit part time on a little physics-based puzzle game. And now, six months later, he's working full-time as an iPhone dev, his little game has expanded into a full-fledged story-driven platforming game with more hype and expectation behind it than perhaps any other App Store release, published by one of the biggest companies to come out of the iPhone gaming scene so far. Not to mention that the App Store itself has grown from a crazy experiment Apple thought up to distribute iPhone software, to a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

So today, on the release of one of the first games that really got us excited about the potential of the iPhone as a gaming device (yes, you can buy it right now if you want), we sit down again with Simon Oliver for an exclusive interview, this time to talk about the road he's traveled over the past few months, and how far both he and his game about little rolling "Rolandos" has come. He talked with us about the Ngmoco partnership and how it helped him as a developer, the viability of Rolando as a $9.99 game, and the future of both what he's working on and what the App Store needs as a gaming platform.

I've been looking for a project management solution for a long, long time. I've tried everything from homemade systems -- based on folders and Spotlight tagging -- to attempting to bend applications such as Bento to do what I really want: collect my notes, work-in-progress files, communications and brainstorms in one place with a fluid way to associate them, organize and rearrange them, and find them quickly ... without forcing me into a single mode of thinking.

The first time I looked at Curio, I had what I've learned is a fairly common reaction to it: I balked at the apparent lack of structure. As every designer knows, a blank page is a scary thing. It was a few months later that I was reading an article about it which re-sparked my curiosity (no pun intended), and I dug back in. It was at that point that I realized that Curio was the project management, note-taking and brainstorming solution I'd been looking for, or at least as close as I've found so far. Read on for an in-depth look at Curio's possibilities ... and a 10% off coupon code!

Just because Apple aficionados have historically been willing to pay a modest premium for the world's best computers, music players and cellphones, that doesn't mean they don't enjoy the occasional bargain as much as their Windows-using, Zune-toting, Blackberry-typing brethren. In the spirit of healthy holiday consumerism, here's our list (far from comprehensive) of a few select deals for the Black Friday sales. You can get full-on shop-till-you-drop coverage at dealmac.com, and quick overviews from Gizmodo and dealNN.

Naturally, Amazon and Newegg both have big discounts on most gear for today -- not all of it is good for Macheads but there are plenty of treats on the hard drive, headphone and camera front. Amazon is selling SwissGear backpacks for $24, which is tempting, and shows the iPod touch 8GB at $209; that's likely to be matched by the Apple Store's one-day discount as it rolls around the globe. Newegg has the usual excellent pricing on hard drives and flash memory, although not much on the 'secret deals page' is overly Apple-oriented; $19 for an 8 GB flash drive might raise some eyebrows and liberate some funds, though.

The heat on hardware is also clearly set to 'high' with the discounts from Best Buy, MacMall and MacConnection. Right now MacConnection is showing the best deal on my benchmark machine (the midrange MacBook unibody), with a selling price of $1149 -- keep an eye on the other sites too, as MacMall is right behind at $1179.

If you love to watch TV on your shiny Mac screen, there's a deal for you too. Elgato is offering $50 off of the $149 EyeTV Hybrid HDTV tuner and DVR software bundle today. This is a particularly good item for anyone who has an older analog TV in a spot where they don't have cable or satellite but they do have a computer -- it's a great way to get through the digital transition in February of 2009, as domestic US television drops its analog signals for good.

Nobody can live by hardware alone, though, and there are plenty of software and accessory vendors who want to grab their fair share of your gift budget. A few of note below...

If the favorite people on your holiday gift list spend more time in hotels and airports than they do hanging out with you, then we can help. This guide to gifts for the frequent traveler is sure to put a smile on the face of your friends or loved ones wherever their travels may take them in 2009.

Power on the go
With rare exceptions, it's almost impossible to find an airport or hotel room with enough power outlets for all of your electronic gadgets. Rather than challenging someone to a duel with presentation laser pointers to see who gets to use the one available airport outlet, I've come up with a more peaceful solution -- carrying a compact multiple outlet with me.

Belkin's Mini Surge Protector with USB Charger (at right, above) can handle three AC and two USB devices simultaneously. It's tiny and light, and fits just in just about any laptop case.

My personal favorite is the Monster Cable Outlets To Go Power Strip (below), which fits six widely-spaced grounded AC outlets in a very flat 8.5" x 2.25" x 1.8" box. This one works very well with those obnoxious adapters that cover two or three outlets by themselves, and is perfect for sharing a single power outlet with five total strangers. If more people carried these in their laptop cases, there would be world peace...at least in airports. It's also available in even more compact 3 and 4 outlet models.

• Belkin Mini Surge Protector with USB Charger: $24.99
• Monster Cable Outlets To Go Power Strip -- 6 outlet: $29.95

More below...

From tablets to type, finding the right gift for the choosy graphics expert in your life can be frustrating. Here are plenty of ideas at a variety of price points that should make any designer merry and joyful.

Graphics Tablets
For any designer, a graphics tablet is a great way to illustrate, or just precisely control your mouse. I started using one about eight years ago to cope with RSI, and I've never looked back. Wacom offers the Graphire Wireless 6" x 8" tablet that connects to your Mac via Bluetooth. (It's not entirely wireless, however: you have to plug it in to charge it.) You can use it up to 30 feet away. If Bluetooth isn't your thing, or charging your tablet every night doesn't sound like fun, the Intuos 3 USB tablet is available in a variety of sizes, including 6" x 8". The USB version also offers more dynamic pressure sensitivity, touch strips, accessories, and a five-button mouse.

• Wacom Graphire Wireless 6 x 8 tablet: $249
• Wacom Intuos 3 USB 6 x 8 tablet: $329

SlimKey v2
Keeping your desk tidy is a constant challenge for the designer. Designers tend to fall into three categories when organizing their desks: the piler, the spreader, and whatever. In any case, keeping your monitor up and away from the mess is sometimes helpful (or, it gives you more room to spread stuff into). The SlimKey v2 raises your iMac or Cinema Display with a spiffy ribbon of aluminum designed to match your hardware. Plus, it features four powered USB 2.0 ports: very handy if you have an iMac and a lot of peripherals.

• SlimKey v2: $65

This time in Ask TUAW we'll be looking at questions about iSync, hidden files in the Finder, non-destructive disk partitioning, migrating to a new Mac and more.

As always, your suggestions are most welcome, and questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X, as certain answers will vary between different Macs and Tiger vs. Leopard, etc. (we'll assume you're running Leopard if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!

The App Store is somewhat deluged with music-related applications. While I find many of the instruments to be novelties, the iPhone-based remote controls available for various Digital Audio Workstations have really caught my attention.

I've been playing around with the various musical remote controllers available for a while now. When the various iTouchMidi controllers were released, I got pretty excited. Problematically, I'm a fan of Logic Pro, and these intriguing but mostly Logic-incompatible controllers weren't up to snuff for my personal needs. It was a few weeks before I discovered the available OpenSound Control (OSC) apps in the App Store.

I've played with the lineup of controllers such as OSCemote and Mrmr (iTunes link), and both of those are a lot of fun with a good amount of potential. One stood out for me, though, and TouchOSC has officially become part of my home studio setup.

TouchOSC provides an array of control screens consisting of faders, rotary controls, buttons, toggles, XY pads, multi-faders/toggles and LEDs in various configurations. It communicates wirelessly with software and hardware which can receive and send the OSC protocol. I thought I'd offer a quick rundown of the steps I used to get from TouchOSC to Logic. I'm sure the same methods can be applied to other software, with a little variation.

An overview of the controller configurations in TouchOSC can be found in the gallery below. Read on for the lowdown.

Gallery: TouchOSC

With Automator, you can easily streamline common tasks. If you work with many files (i.e. pictures), then you know how easy it is to lose track because of incorrectly named files. With this Automator workflow, you'll never lose your place (or a file) again.

Building the Workflow
To create this workflow, simply add the following Automator actions (in the same order):

• Get Specified Finder Items
• Rename Finder Items

When you add the "Rename Finder Items" action to your workflow, Automator will ask if you want to copy the files so you don't mess with the originals. Choose "Don't Add."

Configuring the Workflow
In the "Rename Finder Items" action, you have almost unlimited choices for renaming schemes. To get started, select a scheme from the first drop-down box. You can choose from: Add Date or time, Add Text, Change Case, Make Sequential, Replace Text, Name Single Item.

Once you select your renaming scheme, choose the options you want based on the scheme. For instance, if you wanted the "Make Sequential" scheme, you could choose to use existing naming, or create a new name. You can also select options for where to place the numbers, which number to start counting from, and how to separate the number from the rest of the text.

Running the Workflow
Once you have your naming scheme figured out, it's time to run the workflow, and have Automator do the heavy-lifting. Drag and drop the files you want renamed onto the "Get Specified Finder Items" workflow. They will be added to the list of files to be renamed. You can then click the "Run" button in the top-right corner of the window. Your original files will be renamed, leaving you with perfectly renamed files. You can now save your workflow.

Want more Mac Automation or AppleScript tutorials? Visit TUAW's Mac Automation and AppleScript sections.

My search for the perfect software task management solution has been going on for a long time, and I think I've finally found the answer: Remember the Milk for iPhone (iTunes link). I've tried almost all of the big names in task managers: iGTD, Things, OmniFocus, and even Leopard's built-in todo functionality. None of them have met my needs.

For me, a task list needs to be ubiquitously available, and very quick and easy to interact with. For me, that means I need a native iPhone app, which immediately eliminates iGTD and Leopard's To Do list, since there is no iPhone equivalent. That leaves me with Things, OmniFocus, and RTM, all of which now have native iPhone apps.

One of my requirements is that my tasks synchronize to a web server, so that I don't need to have my laptop turned on to synchronize my tasks to my iPhone. This eliminated Things as a contender for me, since it currently only supports direct synchronizing over the same wireless network. OmniFocus had therefore been my de-facto task management tool due to its ability to synchronize both the Mac and iPhone versions to either MobileMe, or your own web server using WebDAV. The main problem I've had with OmniFocus on the iPhone is how incredibly slow it is to start up and synchronize. A recent update attempted to address this issue by allowing new tasks to be added while the synchronization was occurring, but it's still just not quick enough.

Last week, my previously-very-anti-Mac dad started using a Mac mini, and I wrote about his experience -- positive, to say the least. If you haven't read the story of his first day with the Mac, you might want to read that first. Yesterday, one week in, I checked in to see how he's doing.

So far, Dad has nothing but positive things to say about the Mac. Even when I asked him specifically for things he dislikes, he had to think for a second. "It's such a breath of fresh air from what I'm used to, I can't come up with anything specific that I dislike." High praise indeed from the man who doesn't like The Daily Show because of its intro music.

He also just discovered that, in Leopard, there's a little light underneath each application that tells you it's running. That was his huge discovery yesterday, and something he was proud of finding on his own.

Asked about what he does like, he mentioned the ease of application installations. He loves Dashboard widgets, and installed the MySQL Health widget that comes with the MySQL GUI tools. He did this without my help, too, which is great progress.

When it comes to virtualization on the Mac, it's mostly discussed in the context of running a variant of Microsoft Windows. This makes sense; the ease of getting Windows to run within OS X (on Intel hardware) is one of the key reasons many first-time Mac buyers are migrating to Apple. However, Windows is hardly the only game in town.

Although the annual proclamations of "the year of the Linux desktop" haven't really panned out, thanks to distributions like Ubuntu, more and more individuals are at least giving Linux a try. Today, Canonical made both the server and desktop versions of Ubuntu 8.10 (codenamed 'Intrepid Ibex') available for download.

Even before the Intel switch, PPC users could effectively run Linux distros on their machines, but virtualization coupled with Intel hardware has made running a VM of Ubuntu -- or any Linux distribution -- fairly painless. Using commercial software like VMware Fusion 2.0 or Parallels Desktop, or open source and free solutions like VirtualBox, you can set up an Ubuntu virtual machine much like you would with Windows.

If you have ever installed a Windows virtual machine, using Parallels, Fusion or VirtualBox, the process for installing Ubuntu is almost exactly the same. Download the Ubuntu 8.10 ISO image (a slow process today with the demand for the new release; it should speed up next week, and there are Bittorrent seeds for faster service) and then select that image for the virtual CD drive when creating your VM. The process, depending on your system, should take under 20 minutes from beginning to end.

Today, I set up a virtual machine of Ubuntu 8.10 in both VMware Fusion 2.0 and VirtualBox 2.04. Parallels Desktop works with Ubuntu, but I had problems trying to get Ubuntu 8.04 installed and am still reading reports of problems with 8.10. Parallels might work just fine with Ubuntu 8.10, but keep in mind that it might be kludgy.

Read on for more install options.

This is the first part of an occasional series about my Dad, who, as a long-time Windows user, decided to switch to the Mac. If you're interested in the whole story, more installments are here.

As far as database management and Windows programming is concerned, my dad is what you'd call "hard-core." He's been writing software since the 1960s, starting at Honeywell, then Hewlett Packard, eventually starting his own business. He is an expert with the HP 3000 minicomputer, which, in its day, was heavy computing iron to have lying around.

So it came as a bit of a shock when he called last week and said, "I'm ready to buy a Mac."

He and I are working on a web development project together using open-source tools. Because his workstation is set up for the Microsoft world of SQL Server and .NET, installing XAMPP was wreaking havoc with his complicated array of security software, including Norton and BitDefender. He wanted to start fresh, and work on a system without having to worry about something randomly disallowing access to port 3306. Understandable.